Only the third film by the creative team of producer Ismail Merchant and writer-director James Ivory, the tandem forever known as Merchant Ivory (which also included the film making equivalent of the fifth Beatle, writer Ruth Prawler Jhabvala, whom many believe to have actually written the majority of Merchant Ivory films).
The Actor's Life
Based on a true story.
The leader of the troupe, or wallah, Mr . Tony Cunningham (Geoffrey Kendal) struggles along the towns and villages finding places for his performers to put on their shows; town after town, the once willing and accepting patrons have moved on to sports and movies to entertain the citizenry.
Mr. Cunningham must further deal with a fracturing group of actors who through financial hardship and familial discord, must decide as to whether to continue living the hand-to-mouth life of an artist, or join the real world of paychecks, bills, and domesticity.
Merchant Ivory's Recurring Themes
The relationships between the actors themselves and the outside world provide for ample drama and conflict. One such relationship between Mrs. Carla Cunningham (Laura Lidell) and her daughter, actress Lizzie (Felicity Kindal), as written, seems like a reworking of the relationship between Ms. Honeycutt (Helena Bonham-Carter) and her chaperone Ms. Charlotte (Maggie Smith) from E.M. Forster’s A Room With A View, which of course the Merchant Ivory team will helm as their first international box-office smash in 1986.
Another theme to be reworked later, revolves around the uneasy relationship between India as a nation and Britain as an empire (Heat and Dust [1983]). Witness the very moving early scenes in Shakespeare Wallah, when a king hosts the troupe in his castle; dining together the night before the performance, the king chooses to quote some rather dire lines from Shakespeare regarding the futility of feudal states.
Merchant Ivory’s Road to Romance
Normally with road movies there is little or no plot; simply episodic sequences meant to develop a sense of understanding and relativity between the characters and the audience. The drama lies in the arc of the characters and where they are, as people, when the journey begins, and where they are when it ends.
The troupe makes an extended stop to perform in a town where a film is being made, starring a big movie star. This part of the film opens with a long song and dance number performed by Manjula (Madhur Jaffrey), the movie star; striking in and of itself, but more so given the recent discovery by the western world of Bollywood.
The young English actress, Lizzie, soon becomes involved romantically with the beautiful Bollywood movie star’s boyfriend, Sanju (Shashi Kapoor); which sets up an awkward and slapstick encounter between the poor English thespian and the rich Indian movie star.
The romantic entanglements will soon come undone when the movie star makes her presence felt at the troupe’s stage performance; as all heads turn away from the stage to gawk at the screen goddess sitting dead center of the back row.
This stormy scene will push Sanju into Lizzie’s arms. But, the love affair is riddled with complications, which will force Lizzie to choose between continuing her life as an artist or changing course and becoming a wife (which even now, is still a pretty refreshing dilemma for a romantic drama).
Because the movie stands as an interesting archival piece of cinematic history; an early document representing the artistic and creative development of one of the most important creative teams in film history, Shakespeare Wallah is worth viewing, maybe even twice.
